The bigoted Mr. Guarino

It was no surprise to me that Greensboro physician Joe Guarino, who blogs at Triad Conservative, was unhappy at the outcome of Tuesday’s primary elections for Greensboro mayor and City Council. Guarino sees commies in every corner, so the fact that most of the conservative candidates got waxed and that the lone conservative incumbent trails his challenger heading into the general election was disturbing to him, and he sees no good end for the city as long as it keeps electing people he thinks of as “cultural Marxists.”

He’s certainly entitled to his opinion as far as that goes. And if he had said nothing else, I’d’ve shrugged and moved on. But then he added:

The fact that we now have a majority-minority city is another bad prognostic indicator. It will be nearly impossible to elect good people here. In fact, it was already very difficult; but now it is even more difficult. The council we elect is a reflection of the demographics and values of our local population; and it ain’t pretty.

Read that again. He’s actually arguing that because whites are now a minority in Greensboro, Greensboro can’t elect good people anymore. Even if you give Guarino the greatest possible benefit of the doubt — which, frankly, he hasn’t earned in recent years — he’s saying that demographics makes it impossible to elect good people to the council. In other words, it’s those uppity colored folk keeping Greensboro from being what it can be.

He goes on to imply that “decent” white folk will move out of the city because of this. I say implied, but his meaning is pretty damned clear.

I met Guarino more than a decade ago at some blogging meet-ups. He struck me then as likable enough, if well to the right of me on the political spectrum — sincere but misguided. Either I completely misjudged him or he has migrated to a far darker place since we last met, because his anti-Semitism and racism have become too overt to deny.